Well, how do they?
It’s not a simple question! Human language differs from animal and plant communication systems in that it enables the transmission of ideas, which are abstractions. Think of the Pythagorean theorem or tripartite government.
Many explanations of how human language came to exist seem to be stabbing in the dark.
Sounds are waves. You can adjust the frequency and amplitude. Similar to light. Here in Florida there was an event a few days ago where they thought that all the Cell carriers went down, but they hadn’t, T-Mobile had a big fiber optic pipe that went down, it stressed out all the other carriers with the overload. It brought up warm memories of when I was an undergrad, and my senior project was to run sunlight through a fiber optic cable into a diffraction grating so that we could look at the spectroscopy by rotating the grating across an optical sensor and reading the intensity from a circuit. If i remember correctly we saw a calcium line and a hydrogen line and everything else on my cheap cobbled-together apparatus was too noisy to see. but frankly it was several decades ago.
You think the sun moves very slowly across the sky, but if you’ve stuck a piece of fiber optic line in a tripod and are having to adjust it every 60 seconds or so, you’ll realize it’s faster than you think. 😀
The overall temperature curve did line up with Stefan-Boltzmann, if i recall correctly.
As to,
Actually, “How Do Sounds Contain Ideas?”, turns out to be a fairly simple question to answer.
Obviously, sounds can ‘carry’ ideas but, since ideas are ‘abstract’, (i.e. immaterial), in their fundamental essence, then sounds, being the purely physical medium that they are, cannot possibly ‘contain’ immaterial ideas.
That is to say that immaterial ideas simply are not, and never will be, reducible purely to the sound that carries them when we speak. Neither will abstract, immaterial, ideas ever be reducible to any other materialistic medium and/or explanation that atheists may try to put forth.
Ideas, like information itself, is forever beyond the scope of atheistic materialism.
The fact that immaterial ideas and information are not, and never will be, reducible to purely materialistic explanations is fairly simple to demonstrate. Although immaterial information and/or ideas can be encoded on an almost endless variety of material substrates, using an almost endless variety of different languages, yet the meaning of that immaterial information and/or idea never changes between the material substrates as long as the information is faithfully encoded and decoded on the almost endless variety of material substrates. In other words, there is something profoundly immaterial about information that simply refuses to be reduced to materialistic descriptions, explanations, and/or ‘sounds’
As George Williams pointed out, “Information doesn’t have mass or charge or length in millimeters. Likewise, matter doesn’t have bytes…”
And as Michael Egnor asked, What is the physics behind the Pythagorean theorem?,,, What is the location of modus ponens? How much does Gödel’s incompleteness theorem weigh? What is the physics of non-contradiction? How many millimeters long is Clark’s argument for naturalism?…
The same sorts of questions be asked about any other idea. Take the word ‘species’. How much does the concept of species weigh? Does the concept of ‘species’ weigh more in English or in Chinese? How long in the concept of species in millimeters? How fast does the concept go? Is the concept of species faster or slower than the speed of light? Is the concept of species positively or negatively charged? Or etc.. etc.. ?..
That is to say, if something is not composed of particles, or does not have physical properties (e.g., length, mass, energy, momentum, orientation, position, etc), it is, of necessity, a immaterial categorization and/or definition of the immaterial mind. The concept of species simply has no physical properties that we can measure, and therefore the concept of species itself is forever beyond the scope of the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinists.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Last year a Darwinist admitted that “The most important concept in all of biology, (i.e. species), is a complete mystery”
In fact, Charles Darwin himself admitted that he did not have a rigid definition for what the term ‘species’ actually meant when he stated that, “I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience.,,,”
As should be needless to say, the inability for a supposedly scientific theory, a supposedly scientific theory that seeks to explain the “Origin of Species” in the first place, to clearly define what a species actually is is a clear indication that that supposedly scientific theory cannot possibly be the proper ‘scientific’ explanation for the “Origin of Species” in the first place!
But, on the other hand, since immaterial ideas and/or information are not, and never will be, reducible to materialistic explanations, then it directly follows that matter and energy themselves must be reducible to the immaterial explanations of mind and/or information.
And this is exactly what we find,
Due to advances in quantum mechanics, the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:
And here are eight intersecting lines of experimental evidence from quantum mechanics that shows that consciousness must precede material reality
Here are a couple of examples from that list. Wheeler’s Delayed Choice experiment and Leggett’s inequality
Via Wheeler’s Delayed Choice experiment we find that, ““It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”
Likewise, via Leggett’s inequality, we find that “Leggett’s inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we’re not observing it.”
As well, Wheeler, Vedral, and Zeilinger are all on record as to regarding (immaterial) information, not matter and energy, to be the fundamental definition of reality.
Thus the answer to the question “How Do Sounds Contain Ideas?”, turns out to be a fairly simple answer. Sounds don’t, and can’t, ‘contain’ immaterial ideas and/or information, but immaterial ideas and/or information can ‘contain’ sounds. That is to say, immaterial ideas and/or information are not, and never will be, reducible to matter and energy, but matter and energy are found, via quantum mechanics, to be reducible to the immaterial explanations of mind and information.
Colossians 1:17,
“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Or related interest to this topic, The Bible tells us that God ‘spoke’ reality, specifically light, into existence,,,
And, interestingly, there is now known to be a very deep connection between sound and light:
Verse: